Island Christmas

by M. L. Buchman

  Her radio was back at the house, so all she could do was wait and watch for the plane to circle down and make a neat landing on the runway.

  The angle of the final flare and the skill at riding the island’s notoriously squirrely winds to best advantage was the giveaway.

  She squealed again, this time with delight.

  Tante Daniels hadn’t said she was coming for Christmas, but as the small jet eased to a halt close by the hangar, Miranda knew it had to be her.

  And then she cursed to herself. She really should have recognized the Cirrus Vision SF50. It was the only production single-engine jet—just having the one Franklin engine accounted for the peculiar sound.

  When she emerged from the jet’s cabin, Miranda just raced up to her, and threw her arms around her.

  “Welcome home.”

  Tante Daniels kissed her on top of the head as she always had. She was the one person in the world who was always safe. Even safer than Mike.

  3

  Because Tante Daniels’ jet was so small, there was just enough room to tuck it out of the storm and into the island hangar. It was a close fit: on one side the Mooney prop plane that Mike flew the team around in, and on the other, partly under, her own taller 1958 F-86 Sabrejet fighter plane.

  The Vision was very surprising. Sixty years newer in design, it was smaller than the Sabrejet by two meters, yet could carry seven people including the pilot in luxury, instead of one in a cramped cockpit. Of course, it couldn’t break the speed of sound, or shoot its machine guns, or drop bombs as her Sabrejet once had, but it was a very pretty little machine with a very high-grade safety factor, including a built-in parachute system.

  She would have liked more time to inspect it, but the storm was kicking harder with each passing minute. They locked the hangar door, then Tante Daniels and Jeremy clung to the tractor’s rollbar as Miranda raced it back to the garage.

  Safely inside the main house, they could finally speak without shouting over the wind’s roar.

  “You’re still feeding the deer apple rings. That’s so cute.”

  “You said it was important.” Miranda hung up her coat by the back door and moved Holly’s to another peg so that Tante Daniels could have her usual spot. By which time, Tante Daniels had hung her coat at the end where Jeremy’s had been. He then hung his coat on Tante Daniels’ peg. That wasn’t how it was supposed to be.

  The others didn’t seem to care, so she let it be.

  She’d followed them halfway to the kitchen but was still bothered by the order of the coats. Doubling back, she rearranged them because they might not care, but she did. If she ordered them all alphabetically, that left her own coat and Tante Tanya Daniels’ on their traditional pegs. Then she organized everyone’s boots to be directly under their coats, with hats and gloves lined up on the shelf above.

  As always, by the time she entered the kitchen, Tante Daniels was on a first-name basis with everybody. Miranda had long since given up on studying how she did that, but she never failed.

  As she entered the enveloping warmth of the kitchen, Mike handed her a steaming mug of mulled apple cider. It was her mother’s mug, but Holly was already drinking out of her own mug, so she supposed it was okay.

  She sipped at the hot liquid, enjoying the flavors and the way it warmed her insides. Everyone looked to be enjoying themselves. That boded well for them enjoying this visit to the island. She knew it was her job as hostess to make sure that they did, and so far everything was going well.

  Mom had been a great hostess. Miranda remembered the big holiday parties that the Chases used to have here—people flying in from all over until every bunkbed in every room was filled to the limits. Other than the wake for her parents, which she’d spent mostly at the far end of the island sitting with the deer, this was the largest gathering since they’d died.

  Holding her mother’s mug made it all feel…okay. Mom to her. There was continuity here on the island.

  And now with Tante Daniels, everyone seemed even happier to be here.

  Miranda had always wanted to grow up to be her, even if she was several inches taller. Her platinum-blonde hair had transitioned effortlessly to pure platinum years before. Miranda’s was still stubbornly brown; there wasn’t anything else to call it but…brown. Tante Daniels’ clothes were always effortless and sophisticated. Miranda had tried dressing that way herself, but site investigations and maintaining the island were far more about jeans and work shirts. In fancy clothes, she simply felt foolish.

  Her boyfriend, Jon, kept asking if she’d dress up to go out on a date with him. But wearing something fancy always made her feel as if she was trying too hard and no longer was herself.

  “Hold it, Tanya,” Holly was smiling. “You told Miranda to feed dried apple rings to deer as a mental buffer against winter storms?”

  Tante Daniels nodded.

  “Aw! That’s so sweet, boss.” Holly squeezed Miranda’s hand.

  “I don’t understand why. They need it.”

  There were some amused chuckles, but Tante Daniels did one of her waiting-patiently-until-Miranda-understood-the-lesson things. It made her feel as if she was twelve. It wasn’t entirely comfortable.

  The more she puzzled at it, the less she understood. “You said they needed it.”

  Tante Daniels shook her head. “I said you needed it. People were so difficult for you. So I invented the apple-ring dilemma for the deer so that you’d have connection to the animals and learn from that example.”

  Miranda dropped onto a stool, unsure of everything all over again.

  “It worked, didn’t it? As a little girl, you learned it feels good to help. It connected you to them. And now, you’ve connected to these people.”

  “Have I?” Miranda looked at her three team members.

  “Hey!” Holly slapped a hand over her heart as if she’d just been stabbed there.

  Mike was smiling.

  Jeremy was unloading the two heavy grocery bags that Tante Daniels had moved from the plane into the tractor’s front bucket for the trip back to the house.

  The timer dinged for the next batch of cookies, and the others all were distracted until there was only her and Tante Daniels.

  “I thought—” Miranda sighed, “—too much!” It was an admonition that Tante Daniels had said so many times to her as a child.

  Tante Daniels nodded. “Remember to ask yourself how you feel. You hugged me on my arrival. You invited these people to your house for Christmas—which I think is both a surprising and a fantastic step. Were those logical decisions or are you connecting to your heart, Mirrie? It’s a really good heart. If you doubt that, just go back out into that storm, and ask the deer. There’s a reason they love you, and it’s not only due to dried-apple rings.”

  Miranda thought about how she felt, and knew she was messing-up right away. Thinking about feeling wasn’t logical. But she did like feeding the deer, always had. It made them so happy.

  “I’m going to keep feeding the deer apple rings before storms.”

  “Good.”

  “Trusting you as much? How am I supposed to do that, Tante Daniels?”

  She leaned in and kissed Miranda on the forehead. “That’s good, too. Try calling me Tanya. Remember, I’m now your friend, not your surrogate parent or therapist. Maybe that will help me become a more real person in your mind.”

  Then Tante Dan—Tanya… Then Tanya picked up one of Holly’s smiling, naked Mrs. Claus cookies, made it dance for a moment in a fashion that seemed surprisingly lurid for an iced sugar cookie, then bit off Mrs. Claus’ head.

  “Oh, that’s a good sugar cookie. You haven’t lost your touch, Mirrie.”

  “My gingerbread!” Miranda had forgotten about it completely between her worries for the deer, and Tanya’s arrival. “Tanya” sounded wrong in her head, but she would try it for a while, just in case it wasn’t.

  “All safe and sound,” Mike pointed to the big cooling rack at the far end of the kitchen co
unter.

  Miranda inspected each piece carefully. None were burnt, and they’d all cooled to a uniform crispness. Normally there were at least a few she had to remake, but Mike was as good as his word. They were all safe and sound.

  “What are all these parts? It doesn’t look like the house.” Tan—ya came up to look at them with her.

  Every year since she was a child, they had built a gingerbread house—this island home. The big, log-cabin-style lodge that had served as the resort center for the big game park, done in miniature.

  “I’m trying something new this year.”

  Miranda wasn’t quite sure why Tanya hugged her so hard, but as soon as she stopped, Miranda started working on the assembly of the gingerbread stand she’d designed to support the gingerbread sculpture.

  4

  There’d been a lot of noise and banter behind her, but they’d left her alone to work on her project. When she’d need a third hand to help her align a piece of gingerbread while she piped the royal icing joint, Jeremy was always right there.

  Eventually he was helping her all the time. “Once I set the table, they really don’t want me helping with dinner. I can barely make toast.”

  Holly was the master of the grill and claimed to be a top cook over a campfire but appeared as dumbfounded as Jeremy about what to do with a stove and oven.

  Miranda just nodded.

  She herself was a good cook, but not nearly in Tanya’s or Mike’s classification. Anyway, she couldn’t think about helping until she had her gingerbread sculpture completed.

  Jeremy started working on a side project when she didn’t immediately need him, but she was too involved to look over. Only fifteen pieces for the base seemed like a cheat, but there were fifty-seven pieces in the main sculpture. By keeping the base so simple, that allowed her more time to focus on the main project.

  Once they were done in the kitchen, and the smells of a cooking standing rib roast swam out of one oven and baking bread from another, Holly, Mike, and Tanya settled at the central dining table. There was talk, joking, and calls of “fifteen-two, fifteen-four, and a pair is six” which told her they were playing cribbage.

  She liked the orderliness of cribbage, though she typically had to play the solitaire version as she was the only one on the island. It would be nice to go play with them, but she had to finish her gingerbread sculpture first.

  Dinner was a definite distraction, but perhaps a well-timed one. It would be best if the first round of construction had time to set fully before she continued. She placed a light linen tea towel over it to keep it hidden from others…and from herself. If she couldn’t see it, she was less likely to think about it.

  5

  “You never met such a determined little gal,” Tanya told the others as she served out slices of her pumpkin-pecan Christmas pie.

  “I think we might have run into her somewhere,” Holly had her chair tipped back so far that Miranda had to look away before she fell.

  “Do you know how many NTSB reports she read after her parents died?”

  Miranda knew the answer to that one, “All of them. Just like Jeremy.”

  Tanya paused with a slice of pie on her pie server and looked at Jeremy. “You, too? All of them?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, I was fooling around in Microsoft Flight Simulator, the professional version that the military uses. It’s my dad’s project. I had just crashed a C-5 Galaxy cargo jet. So, I wanted to see what I’d done wrong. That was when I ran into Miranda’s second-ever investigation report, and I found out how that plane had gone down. Then I read all of the C-5’s crashes. Most of them were before Miranda’s time, but I liked her report best; it explained things so well. After that, I read all of the reports by Miranda Chase, and began re-creating each scenario in the simulator. If you ever go online and watch those videos that summarize crashes and have simulated footage for them, I did a lot of those early on. And once I got interested in plane crashes, I—”

  “How did your parents not murder you?” Holly thumped her chair to the floor and took the pie that Tanya offered. Mike planted a large scoop of vanilla ice cream on the plate, then she set it in front of Miranda.

  “Why would his parents murder him?” Miranda wondered if the pie and ice cream would murder her after so much roast and Yorkshire pudding and those peas with the little onions she liked so much.

  “Self-preservation?” Holly picked up the next piece of pie from the plate, bit off the entire tip, then handed it to Mike. “This one must be yours, mate,” she mumbled with her mouth full.

  He served ice cream on it and set it in front of himself as if nothing was amiss.

  Tanya was still assessing Jeremy with narrowed eyes.

  “No,” Miranda spoke up in his defense. “Jeremy isn’t like me; I mean in any of the hard ways. He’s not…” Tanya never let her say she was all broken inside. Unable to find the words, she just waved at her head. “He is simply exceptionally good at mechanical systems and computers.” But he wasn’t autistic. Didn’t have to fight that cliff-steep learning curve.

  Tanya was no longer watching Jeremy. Instead she was watching Miranda.

  Unsure what to make of that, Miranda focused on eating her pie and ice cream.

  6

  The house slept. Despite the hard winds of the Christmas Eve storm, even the deer and sheep probably slept.

  Not Miranda.

  Instead, she sat in the kitchen at two in the morning, working on her gingerbread structure, and trying not to obsess about the prior evening—as if.

  Jeremy was not on the spectrum. He never had to worry about who liked him or who was laughing at him.

  He could tell that. He would know.

  She couldn’t and wouldn’t.

  Also, had Holly been teasing her about whether or not Miranda wanted to be teased, or was she not wanting to treat her like she treated a friend like Jeremy, or were she and Mike somehow using her as a metaphor for their own tumultuous relationship when… Miranda couldn’t even keep all of the logical variations straight in her mind.

  Finally, Tante Daniels—Tanya!—trying to change her name after all these years. And saying what she’d said about the deer.

  One of the things that Miranda’s particular form of autism gifted her was a photographic memory for the words in a conversation. She—

  Tanya sat down across the wood counter from her, her face shadowed by the darkness outside the range of her small worklight. Only a mug of milk clasped in her hands caught the light with a bright whiteness.

  “When I was six, you said, ‘The deer need an extra treat to get them through the storm.’ When I asked you why, you said, ‘They get scared. Dried apple rings will let them know it will be okay.’ You didn’t say I needed, you said they needed.”

  Tanya sighed. “It always surprises me that you can remember such things. Most neurotypicals, including me, can’t. Even with my training, it’s easy to forget that you can.”

  “Then why did you lie this evening?”

  “The proper question is why did I lie thirty-some years ago. This evening I told the truth. You needed connection so badly. Your father was only interested in seeing what your mind was capable of achieving—what parent has their child working on cracking secret codes at eight that even the CIA can’t unravel? Your mother was deeply overwhelmed by you and her own sense of incompetence and inferiority. Unjustified on both counts I might add; she loved you very much which fixes almost everything, and she was an exceptional woman who I still miss so much. It makes it very hard to come back here sometimes.”

  Miranda had never thought about what her parents’ deaths must have been like for Tanya. When she reached a hand across the counter, Tanya clasped it hard before she continued.

  “But that’s why they hired me. I was fresh out of grad school. I had my PhD and no idea what I wanted to do with it.”

  Once Tanya let go of her hand, Miranda focused on beveling the e
dge of the next piece of gingerbread with a nutmeg rasp to insure a perfect fit.

  Tanya was watching her intently.

  “What.”

  “You’re repurposing a tool for something other than its designed intent. That’s great.”

  “I tried a series of files: fingernail, metal, and wood. None of them provided the correct mix of lightweight for control yet properly coarse for grinding a cookie edge. This seemed a reasonable compromise, and it worked.”

  Tanya simply nodded but she was still smiling like she wanted to give Miranda a gold star. Like she was twelve. Except she wasn’t twelve anymore. Still not comfortable.

  “How did you meet Mom and Dad?”

  “There used to be an Annual Corn Roast and Fly-in at Harvey Field. A small airport just—”

  “Sixty-eight-point-nine miles from here at a heading of one-two-seven to the southeast.”

  “Yes. Right,” Tanya nodded as if of course she knew that.

  Or maybe, she knew that of course Miranda knew that. Why wouldn’t she? It was a simple fact. She could remember the first day she truly understood how FAA flight charts worked. She’d spent an entire afternoon cataloging every airport’s distance and bearing from Spieden Island. How odd it must be to not remember something so simple and logical.

  “I had only recently obtained my pilot’s license and flew in along with hundreds of others for the event. Somehow I met your father there. I mentioned I had a degree and training in autism therapy, and he…sort of…brought me home. Here. To Spieden Island. Your mom was skeptical, but the moment I met you, I knew I had to stay. You were four and could still barely talk. You seemed to exist in one, single, stretched-out panic attack. Little did I know what you’d end up doing to my life.”

  “What was that?”

  Tanya reached out and took one of her hands before she could pick up the next gingerbread piece to test its fit. “Look at me, Miranda.”